{"id":856,"date":"2010-08-01T00:00:20","date_gmt":"2010-08-01T05:00:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/chriscutrone.platypus1917.org\/?p=856"},"modified":"2021-11-18T13:58:35","modified_gmt":"2021-11-18T18:58:35","slug":"a-critique-of-the-rcpu-s-a-on-alain-badiou","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/chriscutrone.platypus1917.org\/?p=856","title":{"rendered":"A critique of the RCP, USA on Alain Badiou"},"content":{"rendered":"

Chinoiserie <\/em><\/h2>\n

A critique of the Revolutionary Communist Party, USA\u2019s \u201cNew Synthesis\u201d<\/h2>\n

Review of Communism: The Beginning of a New Stage<\/em>, Manifesto from the RCP, USA; and Raymond Lotta, Nayi Duniya, and K.\u00a0J.\u00a0A., \u201cAlain Badiou\u2019s \u2018Politics of Emancipation\u2019: A Communism Locked Within the Confines of the Bourgeois World\u201d Demarcations <\/em>1 (Summer\u2013Fall 2009).[1<\/a>]<\/h2>\n

Chris Cutrone<\/h2>\n
\"\"<\/a>

Jean-Jacques Rousseau, portrait painted by Maurice-Quentin La Tour (1754).<\/p><\/div>\n

Prologue<\/h2>\n

DAVID BHOLAT ADOPTED, as epigraph for his essay \u201cBeyond Equality,\u201d the following passage from Joseph Schumpeter\u2019s classic 1942 book Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy<\/em>:<\/p>\n

First and foremost, socialism means a new cultural world\u2026. But second \u2014 what cultural world?\u2026 Some socialists are ready enough with folded hands and the smile of the blessed on their lips, to chant the canticle of justice, equality, freedom in general and freedom from \u201cthe exploitation of man by man\u201d in particular, of peace and love, of fetters broken and cultural energies unchained, of new horizons opened, of new dignities revealed. But that is Rousseau adulterated with some Bentham.[2<\/a>]<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Bholat\u2019s essay follows Schumpeter in seeking to demonstrate the inadequacy and problematic character of the call for social \u201cequality,\u201d for which he finds warrant in Marx\u2019s critique of capital. This is most notable in Marx\u2019s statement, echoing the French socialist Louis Blanc, that an emancipated society beyond capital would be governed by the principle of providing \u201cfrom each according to his ability, to each according to his need.\u201d[3<\/a>]<\/p>\n

Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712\u201378) argued, in his 1754 Discourse on the Origin of Inequality<\/em>, that society alone produced \u201cinequality,\u201d since in nature there are only \u201cdifferences.\u201d Marx sought to fulfill Rousseau\u2019s demand for a society freed from the necessity of commensurability, of making alike what is unlike, in the commodity form of labor \u2014 a society freed from the exigencies of the exchange of labor.<\/p>\n

Jeremy Bentham (1748\u20131832), the founder of Utilitarian philosophy at the end of the 18th century, famously called for society to provide \u201cthe greatest good for the greatest number.\u201d Marx considered his project to fulfill this aspiration as well.<\/p>\n

The modern society of capital has indeed sought to achieve these various desiderata<\/em>, of the individual diversity of incommensurable difference, as well as increased wellbeing of all its members, but has consistently failed to do so. A Marxian approach can be regarded as the immanent<\/em> critique of capital, the critique of capital on its own ground, as expressed by the classical \u201cbourgeois\u201d liberal thinkers such as Rousseau and Bentham at the dawn of modern capitalist society, in that capital fails to fulfill its promise, but it would be desirable to accomplish this.<\/p>\n

Schumpeter, writing in the mid-20th century, thought that modern society was moving inexorably toward \u201csocialism,\u201d and that this was due to the unique and potentially crucial role that modern society allowed \u201cintellectuals\u201d to play. The far greater access to education that modern capitalist society made possible entailed the emergence of a stratum of people who could articulate problems for which they were not directly responsible, on behalf of social groups to which they did not belong. This meant the possibility of a more radical critique and the fostering and mobilizing of broader social discontents than had been possible in pre-capitalist society. This role for intellectuals, combined with the inherent structural social problems of capital and the rise of \u201cdemocratic\u201d politics, created a potentially revolutionary situation in which \u201csocialism,\u201d or the curtailment of capitalist entrepreneurship, was the likely outcome.<\/p>\n

Bholat concluded his essay \u201cBeyond Equality\u201d by citing favorably Slavoj \u017di\u017eek and Jacques Derrida\u2019s critiques, respectively, of \u201cMarx\u2019s tolerance for the defects of first-phase communism,\u201d and of the principle of \u201cequality before the law.\u201d[4<\/a>]<\/p>\n

The possibility of a \u201cdialectical\u201d transformation, the simultaneous negation and fulfillment of capital, its A<\/em>ufhebung <\/em>through a \u201cproletarian socialist\u201d politics, as capital\u2019s simultaneous historical realization and overcoming \u2014 as Marx conceived it, following Hegel \u2014 has proven elusive, but continues to task theoretical accounts inspired by Marxism.<\/p>\n

Entre nous <\/em><\/h2>\n

The Maoist Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP), USA published in 2008 the manifesto, Communism: The Beginning of a New Stage<\/em>. This was followed, in short order, by the launching of a new theoretical journal, Demarcations<\/em>, whose inaugural issue included a lengthy critique of Alain Badiou by RCP members*<\/a> Raymond Lotta, Nayi Duniya, and K.\u00a0J.\u00a0A., titled \u201cAlain Badiou\u2019s \u2018Politics of Emancipation\u2019: A Communism Locked Within the Confines of the Bourgeois World.\u201d Taken together, these and other recent writings of the RCP amount to a significant departure and change in orientation for their tendency of American Maoism. This is noteworthy as they are one of the most prominent Marxist Left organizations in the U.S., helping to organize, for instance, the major anti-war group The World Can\u2019t Wait. The RCP\u2019s spokesperson Sunsara Taylor is regularly invited to represent the radical Left on Fox News and elsewhere. Recently, the RCP has conducted a campaign of interventions featuring Lotta and Taylor as speakers at college and university campuses, including the top elite schools throughout the U.S., on the topic of communism today, in light of the history of the 20th century revolutions in Russia and China and their defeats. In this, the RCP demonstrates a reorientation towards intellectuals as potential cadres for revolutionary politics.[5<\/a>]<\/p>\n

The RCP\u2019s critique of the latter-day and post-Maoist \u201ccommunist\u201d Alain Badiou\u2019s conception of \u201cradical, anarchic equality\u201d is a part of their program of demonstrating \u201cHow Communism Goes Beyond Equality and Why it Must.\u201d It strongly resembles David Bholat\u2019s critique of the traditional Marxist Left in \u201cBeyond Equality.\u201d For, as Bholat wrote, \u201cin light of the world-historical failure of Marxism,\u201d the \u201cone-sided emphasis of historical left movements on equity\u2026 might be reevaluated today,\u201d for such discontents remained \u201cvulnerable to fascist elements motivated by ressentiment<\/em> and revenge\u201d that \u201crepresented a reactionary desire\u2026 to return to a romanticized, precapitalist moment.\u201d[6<\/a>]<\/p>\n

So, some clarification \u2014 and radicalization \u2014 of discontents has appeared necessary. For what is offered by such apparently disparate perspectives as Bholat and the RCP is what might be called a \u201cpost-postmodernist\u201d politics, in which the radical reconsideration of the experience of 20th century Marxism seems in order. This links to Badiou and \u017di\u017eek\u2019s attempts to advance what they call the \u201ccommunist hypothesis.\u201d \u017di\u017eek has spoken of \u201cthe Badiou event\u201d as opening new horizons for both communism and philosophy. Badiou and \u017di\u017eek share a background in Lacanian and Althusserian \u201cpost-structuralist\u201d French thought, in common with other prominent post-New Left thinkers \u2014 and former students of Louis Althusser \u2014 such as Etienne Balibar and Jacques Ranci\u00e8re. Althusser found, in the Russian and Chinese Revolutions, a salutary challenge to the notion of the Hegelian \u201clogic of history,\u201d that revolutionary change could and indeed did happen as a matter of contingency.[7<\/a>] Althusser took great inspiration from Mao in China and Lenin in Russia for advancing the possibility of emancipation against a passive expectancy of automatic evolution in the historical process of capital. Michel Foucault took Althusser as license to go for an entire historiography of contingency.[8<\/a>] For Badiou, this means that emancipation must be conceived of as an \u201cevent,\u201d which involves a fundamental reconsideration of ontology.[9<\/a>] There is a common background for such postmodernist politics, also, in Sartre\u2019s \u201cexistentialist\u201d Marxism, the anti-Cartesian phenomenology of Henri Bergson and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and the \u201cSpinozist\u201d materialism of Georges Bataille.[10<\/a>] The coincidence of vintage 1960s Maoist New Left Marxism with contemporaneous French thought \u2014 Foucault, Deleuze, Derrida \u2014 has resulted in a veritable chinoiserie<\/em> prominent in reconsiderations of Marxism today.[11<\/a>] But what does the \u2014 distinctively French \u2014 image of China say about the potential for a reformulated Leftist politics?[12<\/a>]<\/p>\n

Rousseau<\/h2>\n

The mid-18th century Enlightenment philosophe<\/em> Rousseau stands as the central figure at the critical crossroads for any consideration of the historical emergence of the Left.[13<\/a>] Rousseau has haunted the self-understanding of Marxism, and indeed of revolutionary politics more generally, if only for the problematic influence he exercised on the pre-Marxian Left, most infamously in the ideas of the radical Jacobins such as Robespierre in the Great French Revolution. Lenin famously described himself as a \u201cJacobin indissolubly joined to the organization of the proletariat, which has become conscious of its class interests.\u201d[14<\/a>] Modern conservatism was in an important sense founded by Edmund Burke\u2019s (1729\u201397) anti-Jacobin critique of Rousseau.<\/p>\n

In his critique of Bruno Bauer\u2019s The Jewish Question<\/em> (1843), the young Marx cited the following from Rousseau\u2019s Social Contract <\/em>(1762):<\/p>\n

Whoever dares undertake to establish a people\u2019s institutions must feel himself capable of changing, as it were, human nature, of transforming each individual, who by himself is a complete and solitary whole, into a part of a larger whole, from which, in a sense, the individual receives his life and his being, of substituting a limited and mental existence for the physical and independent existence. He has to take from man his own powers, and give him in exchange alien powers which he cannot employ without the help of other men.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Marx wrote that this was \u201cwell formulated,\u201d but only as \u201cthe abstract notion of political man,\u201d concluding that,<\/p>\n

Human emancipation will only be complete when the real, individual man has absorbed into himself the abstract citizen; when as an individual man, in his everyday life, in his work, and in his relationships, he has become a species-being<\/em>; and when he has recognized and organized his own powers as social<\/em> powers so that he no longer separates this social power from himself as political<\/em> power.[15<\/a>]<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The RCP\u2019s Lotta, Duniya and K.J.A., under the chapter heading \u201cWhy Alain Badiou is a Rousseauist, and Why We should not<\/em> be,\u201d point out that Rousseau\u2019s perspective is that of \u201cbourgeois society:\u201d<\/p>\n

The forms and content of equality in bourgeois society correspond to a certain mode of production: capitalism, based on commodity production and the interactions it engenders: private ownership, production for profit not need, and exploitation of wage-labor. Commodity production is governed by the exchange of equivalents, the measure of the labor time socially necessary to produce these commodities; that is, by an equal standard.[16<\/a>]<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Like Bholat following Derrida in \u201cBeyond Equality,\u201d Lotta, Duniya, and K.J.A. attack \u201cthe standard of \u2018equality before the law\u2019 of bourgeois jurisprudence [as] a standard that serves the equal treatment of the capitalist property holders in a society governed by capitalist market relations,\u201d adding that, \u201cfor the dispossessed, formal equality masks the condition of fundamental powerlessness.\u201d What Lotta et al. dismiss as \u201cformal equality\u201d is not the liberal conception formulated by Rousseau that Marx cited favorably, precisely in its recognition of the \u201calienation\u201d of the \u201cchanging\u201d of \u201chuman nature\u201d in society. Rather, the RCP writers let slip back in the one-sided conception of \u201cpolitics\u201d that Marx criticized and sought to overcome. For them, the opposition between the social and political that Marx diagnosed as symptomatic of modern capitalist society becomes instead the rigged game between exploiters and exploited. Note the need that Marx identified for the \u201cindividual\u201d to \u201c[recognize] and [organize] his own powers as social<\/em> powers so that he no longer separates this social power from himself as political<\/em> power,\u201d something quite different from simply removing the \u201cmask\u201d of false \u201cequality\u201d from the condition of the \u201cdispossessed\u201d in \u201cbourgeois democracy.\u201d Where does the RCP\u2019s perspective of revolutionary politics originate? This is made apparent in the central section of their critique of Badiou over the interpretation of the Shanghai Commune, an event in the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (GPCR) in China.<\/p>\n

La Commune <\/em><\/h2>\n

The GPCR is dear to both Badiou and the RCP. This was the greatest event in the history of Marxism to take place in the era of the 1960s\u201370s New Left, and it exerted a profound attraction and influence over many at the time. The RCP is a direct product of its broad international impact. It seemed to justify Mao\u2019s claim to be the leading international (and not merely Chinese) opponent of \u201crevisionism,\u201d i.e. of the abdication of proletarian socialist revolution in favor of reformism. Apart from factual questions about what really happened during the Cultural Revolution and the substance of Mao\u2019s own politics, both in China and internationally (thoughtful Maoists do not deny the distortion of Mao\u2019s politics by nationalism, but they tend to gloss over the intra-bureaucratic aspects of the GPCR), the issue of what the Cultural Revolution and Maoism more generally might mean<\/em> to people, both then and now, is of more pressing concern. After all, the two most forthright arguments in favor of \u201ccommunism\u201d today are made by Maoists, Badiou and the RCP. It is also significant that both favor the appellation of \u201ccommunist\u201d over \u201cMarxist,\u201d which both do on the grounds of their understanding of the Cultural Revolution.<\/p>\n

The Cultural Revolution is the basis for regarding Mao as making a unique and indispensable contribution to communism. What the Cultural Revolution means to Maoists is fundamentally informed by their conception of capitalism. So, rather than taking sides in or analyzing the social and political phenomenon of the Cultural Revolution per se<\/em>, it is necessary to examine what has been taken to be its significance. The Chinese Cultural Revolution is perhaps the most significant recent \u201cJacobin\u201d moment in the history of Marxism, raising again, in the latter part of the 20th century, long-standing questions about the relation between socialism and democracy \u2014 the issue of \u201ccommunism,\u201d in the strict sense.<\/p>\n

The significance of the Shanghai Commune of 1967 is contested by Badiou and the RCP. For Badiou it was a model akin to the 1792\u201394 radical Jacobin period of the French Revolution. In the Shanghai Commune radicalized students (\u201cRed Guards\u201d) overthrew the local Communist Party apparatus, spreading into a workers\u2019 revolt.\u00a0 While initially enthusiastic about this spontaneous \u201canti-revisionist\u201d upsurge against conservative elements in the CP, Mao and his followers ultimately rejected the Shanghai Commune as a model. They advocated instead the \u201crevolutionary committee\u201d in which the Maoist Communist Party cadres\u2019 paramount leading political character could be preserved. Badiou criticizes this straitjacketing of communism in the \u201cparty-state,\u201d whereas the RCP defends Mao\u2019s politics of rejuvenating the Party and purging it of \u201ccapitalist roaders\u201d as the necessary and sole revolutionary path.<\/p>\n

Badiou, by contrast, sees Mao\u2019s eventual rejection of the Shanghai Commune as a betrayal of \u201cegalitarianism.\u201d For him, the \u201cparty-state\u201d is a brake on the radical \u201cdemocratic\u201d egalitarianism that characterizes \u201ccommunism\u201d as a historically recurrent political phenomenon. The RCP critiques this conception of \u201cequality\u201d and \u201cdirect democracy\u201d as \u201cconcealing class interests\u201d and thus being unable to \u201crise above particular interests.\u201d For instance, according to the RCP, as long as there remains a distinction between \u201cintellectual and manual labor,\u201d intellectuals can come to dominate the social process, even under socialism, thus reproducing a dynamic constantly giving rise to the possible return to capitalism, which is understood primarily as a matter of social and political hierarchy. To the RCP, Badiou is thus prematurely egalitarian.<\/p>\n

Badiou conceives of the relation between freedom and equality as an ontological one, in the mathematical terms of set theory, transhistoricizing it. The RCP, while recognizing the historically specific nature of capitalist class struggle, conceives of the role of the revolutionary proletarian party as the political means for suppressing<\/em> tendencies towards social inequality. In either case, neither Badiou nor the RCP conceives of the transformation of the capitalist mode of production that would allow for overcoming the socially pernicious aspects of specifically capitalist forms of inequality, the dangers of which are understood by Badiou and the RCP rather atavistically. Marx, by contrast, looked forward to the potential for overcoming the conditions of possibility for the reproduction of capitalist class dynamics in the mode of production itself: capital\u2019s overcoming of the need to accumulate the value of surplus labor-time. Marx saw the historical potential to overcome this socially mediating aspect of labor in automated machine production. However, Marx also foresaw that, short of socialism, the drive to accumulate surplus-value results in producing a surplus population, an \u201cindustrial reserve army\u201d of potential \u201cworkers\u201d who thus remain vulnerable to exploitation. A politics based only in their \u201cdemocratic\u201d discontents can result, not in the overcoming of the social need for labor, but only in the (capitalist) demand for more labor. Or, as Max Horkheimer, director of the Marxist Frankfurt Institute for Social Research, put it, machines \u201chave made not work but the workers superfluous.\u201d[17<\/a>]<\/p>\n

For the RCP, Mao in the Cultural Revolution addressed in new and effective ways problems of the \u201ctransition to socialism\u201d never attempted under Stalin. The RCP criticizes Stalin for his failed \u201cmethods\u201d in advancing the transition to socialism, a failure Mao overcame in the Cultural Revolution in China 1966\u201376. The RCP celebrates the egalitarian-emancipatory impulse of the Cultural Revolution while also praising Mao\u2019s guidance and political leadership of the process by which the \u201ccapitalist\u201d road to China\u2019s development was politically overcome and avoided. This struggle ended, according to the RCP, with Mao\u2019s death and the subsequent purging of his followers, known as the \u201cGang of Four,\u201d in 1976, embarking China upon its capitalist development up to the present.<\/p>\n

Badiou explicitly attacks the limitations of Marxism in general, and not merely the \u201cparty-state\u201d form of political rule (for which he holds Marxism responsible), for failing to recognize how the emancipatory striving of \u201cequality\u201d goes \u201cbeyond class.\u201d This is why he favors the designation \u201ccommunism\u201d to \u201cMarxism.\u201d The RCP (rightly) smells a rat in this attempt by Badiou to take communism \u201cbeyond\u201d anti-capitalist class-struggle politics. But in so doing they do not pause to reflect on the subordinate position of class struggle in Marx\u2019s own conception of the possibility of overcoming capital.<\/p>\n

For Marx, the political-economic struggle of the specifically modern classes of capitalists and workers is a projection of the contradiction of capital. The RCP, by contrast, regards the class struggle as constituting the social contradiction in capital. This flows from their understanding of the contradiction of capital as existing between the socialized forces of production and the privatized and hence capitalist relations of production. Privileged empowerment, whether in the form of capitalist private property or in more developed intellectual capacities, is the source rather than the result of the contradiction of capital in the RCP\u2019s traditional \u201cMarxist\u201d view. For the RCP, Badiou\u2019s perspective of radical democratic \u201cequality\u201d does not address such inherent social advantage that intellectuals would enjoy even under socialism, presenting the constant threat of defeating the struggle for socialism.[18<\/a>]<\/p>\n

But the RCP does not stop at upholding Mao in the Cultural Revolution as a model for revolutionary politics. Rather, they attempt a \u201cnew synthesis\u201d in which the relation of Marx, Lenin and Mao as historical figures is reformulated to provide for a 21st century socialist politics that could still learn from but overcome the limitations of the 20th century experience of the Russian and Chinese Revolutions.<\/p>\n

The \u201cnew synthesis\u201d<\/h2>\n

According to a traditional Maoist view, the RCP considers the historical trajectory from Marx through Lenin to Mao as a progress in the theory and practice of the struggle for socialism. But they also detect distinct limitations among all three historical figures and so regard them as importantly complementary rather than successive. For the RCP\u2019s \u201cnew synthesis,\u201d Marx and Lenin can still address the shortcomings of Mao, rather than the latter simply building upon the former. How so?<\/p>\n

It is important first to consider the significance of this change in the RCP\u2019s thinking from traditional Maoism. The RCP\u2019s \u201cnew synthesis\u201d was the cause of a split in the RCP, with some, including Mike Ely, going on to form the Kasama Project. The RCP replies to criticism of their current articulations of the limitations of the Russian and Chinese Revolutions with reference to earlier criticism of the RCP, over the course of the past three decades, for reducing Communism to a \u201ctattered flag\u201d in their reconsideration of this history. But the RCP should be commended for taking this risk.<\/p>\n

The RCP struggles in explaining and relating the limitations of the three principal thinkers in the tradition they look towards for \u201ccommunism.\u201d With Marx, there is the limitation of relatively lacking historical experience of socialist revolution. Only the Paris Commune figures for this history. With Lenin, the limitations of the Bolshevik Revolution are displaced in the RCP\u2019s evaluation of, not Lenin, but Stalin\u2019s attempt to build \u201csocialism\u201d in the 1920s\u201330s. Like the disastrous Great Leap Forward in China (1958\u201361), the first Five-Year Plan in the Soviet Union (1928\u201333), a period of \u201crevolutionary\u201d militancy in the history of Stalin\u2019s rule, is glossed over by the RCP in evaluating the Russian and Chinese 20th century experiences of attempts to \u201cbuild socialism.\u201d[19<\/a>]<\/p>\n

For the RCP, Mao represents a breakthrough. Through his leadership of the Chinese Communist Party, the limitations of the experience of Stalinism in the Soviet Union were overcome, in the Cultural Revolution in China of the 1960s\u201370s. But none of these are examples of success \u2014 socialism, let alone communism, has not yet been achieved \u2014 and they do not exactly add up, but rather require a \u201csynthesis.\u201d<\/p>\n

Mao provides a salutary contribution only the degree to which the Cultural Revolution overcame the problem of Stalinist \u201cmethods,\u201d which are considered bureaucratic and authoritarian in the sense of stifling revolutionary initiative: Stalin did the right things but in the wrong ways. Not secretly manipulated purge \u201ctrials,\u201d but people\u2019s justice would have been the better way to stave off the threat of the \u201ccapitalist road\u201d in the USSR of the 1930s. Most telling about the RCP\u2019s \u201cnew synthesis\u201d is how they conceive its first two figures. For the RCP, a combination of Marx and Lenin taken without Mao becomes a perspective of \u201cEurocentric world revolution.\u201d This is because, in the RCP\u2019s estimation, there is a significant difference between Lenin and \u201cLeninism,\u201d the degree to which the former, according to the RCP, \u201cdid not always live up\u201d to the latter, and the latter is assimilated to what are really phenomena of Stalinism and Maoism, building \u201csocialism in one country,\u201d in which Mao\u2019s own practice, especially in the Cultural Revolution, takes priority. But this begs the question of the Marxist perspective on \u201cworld revolution\u201d \u2014 and the need for revolution in the U.S., which Marx and Lenin themselves thought was key. Instead, the problem of socialism in China dominates the RCP\u2019s historical imagination of revolution.<\/p>\n

World revolution<\/h2>\n

Kant, in his theses in \u201cIdea for a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Point of View\u201d (1784), addressed Rousseau as follows. Kant warned of the danger that,<\/p>\n

[T]he vitality of mankind may fall asleep\u2026. Until this last step to a union of states is taken, which is the halfway mark in the development of mankind, human nature must suffer the cruelest hardships under the guise of external well-being; and Rousseau was not far wrong in preferring the state of savages, so long, that is, as the last stage to which the human race must climb is not attained\u2026. [Mere civilization,] however, is nothing but pretense and glittering misery. In such a condition the human species will no doubt remain until\u2026 it works its way out of the chaotic conditions of its international relations.[20<\/a>]<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Marx considered his political project to be a continuation of Kant\u2019s, no less than Rousseau\u2019s or Bentham\u2019s, albeit under the changed historical conditions of post-Industrial Revolution capitalism, in which \u201cinternational relations\u201d expressed not merely an unenlightened state, but the social contradictions of the civilization of global capital.[21<\/a>] Writing on the Paris Commune of 1870\u201371, Marx addressed the antithetical forms of cosmopolitanism in capital:<\/p>\n

If the Commune was thus the true representative of all the healthy elements of French society, and therefore the truly national government, it was, at the same time, as a working men’s government, as the bold champion of the emancipation of labor, emphatically international. Within sight of that Prussian army, that had annexed to Germany two French provinces, the Commune annexed to France the working people all over the world\u2026. The [preceding] Second Empire [by contrast] had been the jubilee of cosmopolitan blackleggism, the rakes of all countries rushing in at its call for a share in its orgies and in the plunder of the French people.[22<\/a>]<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The RCP remains hampered by the Stalinist perspective of building \u201csocialism in one country,\u201d at the expense of a direct politics of world revolution that characterized the Marxism of Marx\u2019s own time, in the First International. And so the RCP fails to recognize the degree to which Marx\u2019s own politics was \u201cemphatically international\u201d in nature. As Marx scholar Moishe Postone put it,<\/p>\n

Now, the revolution, as imagined by Trotsky \u2014 because it\u2019s Trotsky who really influences Lenin in 1918 \u2014 entailed the idea of permanent revolution, in that, revolution in the East would spark revolution in the West. But I think Trotsky had no illusions about the Soviet Union being socialist. This was the point of his debate with Stalin. The problem is that both were right. That is, Trotsky was right: there is no such thing as \u201csocialism in one country.\u201d Stalin was right, on the other hand, in claiming that this was the only road that they had open to them once revolution failed in the West, between 1918\u20131923. Now, did it have to be done with the terror of Stalin? That\u2019s a very complicated question, but there was terror and it was enormous, and we don\u2019t do ourselves a service by neglecting that. In a sense it becomes an active will against history, as wild as claiming that \u201chistory is on our side.\u201d[23<\/a>]<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Bob Avakian, the leader of the RCP, writing about \u201cLeninism as the bridge,\u201d put the matter of the relation between Marx, Lenin and Mao this way: \u201cMarxism without Leninism is Eurocentric social-chauvinism and social democracy. Maoism without Leninism is nationalism (and also, in certain contexts, social-chauvinism) and bourgeois democracy.\u201d[24<\/a>] But Avakian and the RCP have a fundamental ambivalence about Lenin. In the same article, Avakian wrote that, \u201cas stressed before there is Leninism and there is Lenin, and if Lenin didn\u2019t always live up to Leninism, that doesn\u2019t make Leninism any less than what it is.\u201d This is because, for the RCP, \u201cLeninism\u201d is in fact Stalinism, to which they recognize Lenin\u2019s actual politics cannot be assimilated. It is therefore a standing question of what remains of Marx and Lenin when they are unhitched from the Stalinist-Maoist train of 20th century \u201ccommunism,\u201d the eventual course of the Russian and Chinese Revolutions to which the RCP points for inspiration and guidance. But the RCP\u2019s imagination has always been fired more by the Chinese than the Russian experience. If \u201cLeninism\u201d was a historical \u201cbridge,\u201d it led to Mao\u2019s China.<\/p>\n

The image of China<\/h2>\n

China has provided a Rococo mirror reflecting global realities, whether in the 18th or the 20th and 21st centuries. The Middle Kingdom has stood, spectacular and confounding, for attempts to comprehend in social imagination both civilization and barbarism, now as then. The ancien r\u00e9gime<\/em> at Versailles awaiting its historical fate would have liked to close itself up in a Forbidden City; the fervid imaginations of the 18th century philosophes<\/em> such as Rousseau would have liked to breach the walls of its decadent customs. Both projected their world through the prism of China, which seemed to condense and refract at once all the splendors and horrors \u2014 Kant\u2019s \u201cglittering misery\u201d \u2014 of society. This has also been true of the Left from the latter part of the 20th century to the present. The very existence of China has seemed to suggest some obscure potential for the future of humanity, both thrilling and terrifying. What if China were indeed the center of the world, as many on the Left have wished, ever since the 1960s?<\/p>\n

If today China strikes the imagination as a peculiar authoritarian \u201ccommunist\u201d capitalist powerhouse that may end up leading the world in the 21st century, in the 1960s the Cultural Revolution symbolized China. Immediately prior to the student and worker upheaval in France of May 1968, Jean-Luc Godard directed his film La Chinoise <\/em>(1967) about young revolutionaries in Paris. At around the same time, Horkheimer worried about the appearance of \u201cChinese on the Rhine,\u201d as students began reading and quoting from Mao\u2019s Little Red Book. If in the 18th century the Jacobin revolutionaries wanted France not to be China, in the 1960s would-be French revolutionaries wanted China to be the revolutionary France of the late 20th century.<\/p>\n

In his critique of Jacobinism, Burke wrote that,<\/p>\n

[T]he age of chivalry is gone: that of sophisters, economists, and calculators, has succeeded\u2026. The unbought grace of life\u2026 is gone!\u2026 All the pleasing illusions\u2026 which harmonized the different shades of life, and which, by a bland assimilation, incorporated into politics the sentiments which beautify and soften private society, are to be dissolved by this new conquering empire of light and reason.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

On this scheme of things, a king is but a man; a queen is but a woman; a woman is but an animal; and an animal not of the highest order\u2026. On the scheme of this barbarous philosophy, which is the offspring of cold hearts and muddy understandings\u2026 laws are to be supported only by their terrors, and by the concern, which each individual may find in them, from his own private speculations, or can spare to them from his own private interests.[25<\/a>]<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Still, the Jacobin terror continues. Today in Communist China, a bribery case in producing chemically adulterated pharmaceuticals, baby milk formula, and pet food results in a death sentence, to prevent any decrease in demand from the United States. Chinese authorities dismiss the criticism made on human rights grounds, pointing to the need to be vigilant against a constant threat of \u201ccorruption.\u201d No doubt American consumers wonder what such swift \u201cjustice\u201d could do to improve corporate behavior in the U.S.<\/p>\n

The connection between revolutionary France and China in the bourgeois epoch, from the 18th century through the 20th century to the present, is summed up well in an apocryphal quip supposedly made by the Chinese Communist Premier Zhou Enlai, in response to a question about the historical significance of the French Revolution: Zhou said it was still \u201ctoo soon to tell.\u201d Because of its Revolution in the 20th century, China came to have cast upon it the long shadow of Jacobinism and Rousseau\u2019s 18th century critique of social inequality. But, as Marx discovered long ago, inequality is not the cause<\/em> but the effect<\/em> of capital. Such confusion has contributed to the perspective of \u201cThird World\u201d revolution that had its heyday in the post-WWII Left \u2014 after the 1949 Chinese Revolution \u2014 and that still stalks the imagination of emancipatory politics today. Not only post-postmodernist neo-communists such as Badiou, but also Maoists in the more rigorous 1960s\u201370s tradition such as the RCP, remain beholden to the specter of inequality in the modern world.<\/p>\n

China, as a result of its 20th century revolutionary transformation, has gone from being like the India of the 18th century, its traditional ways of life breaking down and swamped in pre-capitalist obscurity, confronted with the dynamics of global capitalism, to becoming something like a potential Britain of the 18th century \u2014 the manufacturing \u201cworkshop of the world\u201d \u2014 albeit in the profoundly changed circumstances of the 21st century. As Marx, in a 1858 letter to Engels, pointed out about his own time,<\/p>\n

There is no denying that bourgeois society has for the second time experienced its 16th century, a 16th century which, I hope, will sound its death knell just as the first ushered it into the world. The proper task of bourgeois society is the creation of the world market, at least in outline, and of the production based on that market\u2026. For us, the difficult question<\/em> is this: [in Europe] revolution is imminent and will, moreover, instantly assume a socialist character. Will it not necessarily be crushed<\/em> in this little corner of the earth, since the movement<\/em> of bourgeois society is still, in the ascendant<\/em> over a far greater area?[26<\/a>]<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

What the 16th century meant to Marx was the \u201cprimitive accumulation of capital,\u201d the process by which society was transformed, through the liquidation of the peasantry, in the emergence of the modern working class and the bourgeois social relations of its existence. If this process continued in the 19th century, beyond Britain, through the rest of Europe and the United States and Japan, in the 20th century it proceeded in Asia \u2014 through the Russian and Chinese Revolutions. The reconstitution of capital in the 19th century, unleashing a brutal process of late colonial expansion, was, to Marx\u2019s mind, not only unnecessary and hence tragic, but also regressive<\/em> and potentially counterrevolutionary<\/em>. Marx\u2019s warning should have resounded loudly through the \u201crevolutionary\u201d history of Marxism in the 20th century, but was instead repressed and forgotten.<\/p>\n

For Marx and Engels, it was not a matter of China and other countries, newly swept into the maelstrom of capitalist development by the mid-19th century, \u201ccatching up\u201d with Britain and other more \u201cadvanced\u201d areas, but rather the possibility of the social and political turbulence in such \u201ccolonial\u201d zones having any progressive-emancipatory impact on global capital at its core. As Marx wrote, in The Class Struggles in France, 1848\u201350<\/em>, <\/em>about the relation of England to other countries,<\/p>\n

Just as the period of crisis began later [elsewhere] than in England, so also did prosperity. The process originated in England, which is the demiurge of the bourgeois cosmos. [Elsewhere] the various phases of the cycle repeatedly experienced by bourgeois society assume a secondary and tertiary form\u2026. Violent outbreaks naturally erupt sooner at the extremities of the bourgeois body than in its heart, because in the latter the possibilities of accommodation are greater than in the former. On the other hand, the degree to which revolutions [elsewhere] affect England is at the same time the [barometer] that indicates to what extent these revolutions really put into question bourgeois life conditions, and to what extent they touch only their political formations.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

On this all the reactionary attempts to hold back bourgeois development will rebound just as much as will all the ethical indignation and all the enraptured proclamations of the democrats.[27<\/a>]<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This means that the \u201cdemocratic\u201d politics that engenders \u201cethical indignation\u201d at the rank inequality in global capital remains woefully inadequate to the task of overcoming the \u201cbourgeois world\u201d within which the RCP accuses Badiou et al. of remaining \u201clocked.\u201d For subsequent history has clearly shown that the Chinese Revolution under Mao remained trapped in global capital, despite the \u201csocialist\u201d ferment of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution that gripped the imagination of the international Left of the time, \u201cMaoist\u201d and otherwise.[28<\/a>] Without revolutionary socialist consequences in the \u201cheart\u201d of the bourgeois world, revolutions in countries such as China cannot, according to Marx, \u201creally put into question bourgeois life conditions\u201d but \u201ctouch only their political formations.\u201d As Engels put it, in a 1882 letter to the leading German Social Democratic Party Marxist theorist Karl Kautsky,<\/p>\n

[T]he countries inhabited by a native population, which are simply subjugated\u2026 must be taken over for the time being by the [world] proletariat and led as rapidly as possible towards independence. How this process will develop is difficult to say\u2026 [Such places] will perhaps, indeed very probably, produce a revolution\u2026 and [this] would certainly be the best thing for us. We shall have enough to do at home. Once Europe is reorganized [in socialism], and North America, that will furnish such colossal power and such an example that the semi-civilized countries will follow in their wake of their own accord. Economic needs alone will be responsible for this. But as to what social and political phases these countries will then have to pass through before they likewise arrive at socialist organization, we to-day can only advance rather idle hypotheses.[29<\/a>]<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\u201cLocked within the confines of the bourgeois world\u201d<\/h2>\n

Despite the RCP\u2019s critique of the post-1960s New Left neo-communism of Badiou, and its partial recognition that Marx and the best of Marxism sought to go beyond \u201cbourgeois\u201d discontents and demands for equality in capital, the RCP perspective on Marxism remains compromised by its focus on capitalist inequality. This leads to an ambivalent and confused conception of the potential role of \u201cintellectuals\u201d in revolutionary politics \u2014 a role highlighted in the mid-20th century by even such unreservedly \u201cbourgeois\u201d perspectives such as that of Joseph Schumpeter, and also by figures influential for the 1960s New Left such as C. Wright Mills.[30<\/a>] The RCP, along with other tendencies of post-New Left politics preoccupied by problems of inequality and hierarchy, such as neo-anarchism, suspects intellectuals of containing the germ for reproducing capitalism through inequality. Likewise, the RCP remains confused about the supposed problem of a \u201cEuro-\u201d or \u201cWestern\u201d-centric perspective on \u201cworld revolution.\u201d In this sense, the RCP remains trapped by the preoccupations of 1960s-era New Left Maoism in which they originated, despite their attempts to recover the critical purchase of the earlier revolutionary politics of Marx and Lenin. Despite their intended critical approach to this history, they fail to consider how Maoism may have represented a retreat<\/em> rather than an advance<\/em> from such revolutionary Marxism. For, as Lenin recognized, the best of Marxist revolutionary politics was not opposed to but rather necessarily stood within the tradition of Rousseau and the radical bourgeois intellectual \u201cJacobin\u201d legacy of the 18th century, while attempting to transcend it.[31<\/a>] Like it or not, and either for ill or for good, we remain \u201clocked in the bourgeois world,\u201d within whose conditions we must try to make any possible revolution. | \u00a7<\/strong><\/p>\n

Originally published in <\/em>The Platypus Review<\/strong> #26 (August 2010).<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

*<\/a> Correction: It should not be assumed that writers for Demarcations<\/em> are members of the RCP.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\n

1<\/a>. For Communism: The Beginning of a New Stage<\/em>, see <http:\/\/www.rwor.org\/Manifesto\/Manifesto.html<\/a>>. Lotta et al. is available online at <http:\/\/www.demarcations-journal.org\/issue01\/demarcations_badiou.html<\/a>>.<\/p>\n

2<\/a>. David Bholat, \u201cBeyond Equality,\u201d Rethinking Marxism <\/em>vol. 22 no. 2 (April 2010), 272\u2013284.<\/p>\n

3<\/a>. Marx, Critique of the <\/em>Gotha<\/em> Program <\/em>(1875), in Robert C. Tucker, ed., The Marx-Engels Reader<\/em> (New York: Norton, 2nd ed., 1978), 531.<\/p>\n

4<\/a>. Bholat, \u201cBeyond Equality,\u201d 282.<\/p>\n

5<\/a>. See \u201cAn Open Letter from Raymond Lotta to Tony Judt and the NYU Community on the Responsibility of Intellectuals to the Truth, Including and Especially the Truth about Communism,\u201d in Revolution<\/em> #180 (October 25, 2009), available online at <http:\/\/revcom.us\/a\/180\/Lotta_Open_Letter-en.html<\/a>>, in which Lotta states that,<\/p>\n

Yes, revolutionary power must be held on to: a new state power and the overall leadership of a vanguard party are indispensable. But leadership must be exercised in ways that are, in certain important and crucial respects, different from how this was understood and practiced in the past. This [RCP\u2019s] new synthesis recognizes the indispensable role of intellectual ferment and dissent in socialist society.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

6<\/a>. Bholat, \u201cBeyond Equality,\u201d 282.<\/p>\n

7<\/a>. See Louis Althusser, \u201cContradiction and Overdetermination\u201d (1962), New Left Review<\/em> I\/41 (January\u2013February 1967), 15\u201335. Also in For Marx<\/em> (1965), trans. Ben Brewster (London: New Left Books, 1977), 87\u2013116.<\/p>\n

8<\/a>. See, for instance, Michel Foucault, \u201cNietzsche, Genealogy, History\u201d (1971), in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews<\/em>, ed. D. F. Bouchard (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977), 139\u2013164, available online at <http:\/\/www.scribd.com\/doc\/4475734\/foucault-nietzsche-genealogy-history<\/a>>, in which Foucault ignored that Nietzsche\u2019s famous On the Genealogy of Morals<\/em> (1887) was \u201ca polemic\u201d against any such \u201cgenealogy,\u201d and so turned Nietzsche, in keeping with Foucault\u2019s own intent, from a philosopher of freedom into freedom\u2019s \u201cdeconstructionist\u201d:<\/p>\n

In this sense, genealogy returns to the\u2026 history that Nietzsche recognized in [his 1874 essay \u201cOn the Use and Abuse of History for Life\u201d]\u2026. [But] the critique of the injustices of the past by a truth held by men in the present becomes the destruction of the man who maintains knowledge by the injustice proper to the will to knowledge. (164)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

9<\/a>. See Alain Badiou, Being and Event<\/em>, trans. Oliver Feltham (New York: Continuum, 2007).<\/p>\n

10<\/a>. See the interview with Badiou by Filippo del Luchesse and Jason Smith, conducted in Los Angeles February 7, 2007, \u201c\u00a0\u2018We Need a Popular Discipline\u2019: Contemporary Politics and the Crisis of the Negative,\u201d Critical Inquiry<\/em> 34, no. 4 (Summer 2008), 645\u2013659.<\/p>\n

11<\/a>. See Richard Wolin, The Wind from the East: French Intellectuals, the Cultural Revolution, and the Legacy of the 1960s<\/em> (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010).<\/p>\n

12<\/a>. See Peter Hallward\u2019s essay on Badiou\u2019s Logiques des Mondes <\/em>(Logics of Worlds<\/em>), \u201cOrder and Event,\u201d New Left Review <\/em>53 (September\u2013October 2008).<\/p>\n

13<\/a>. As James Miller, author of The Passion of Michel Foucault<\/em> (2000), put it in his 1992 introduction to Rousseau\u2019s Discourse on the Origin of Inequality <\/em>(Indianapolis: Hackett, 1992),<\/p>\n

The principle of freedom and its corollary, \u201cperfectibility\u201d\u2026 suggest that the possibilities for being human are both multiple and, literally, endless\u2026. Contemporaries like Kant well understood the novelty and radical implications of Rousseau\u2019s new principle of freedom [and] appreciated his unusual stress on history as the site where the true nature of our species is simultaneously realized and perverted, revealed and distorted. A new way of thinking about the human condition had appeared\u2026. As Hegel put it, \u201cThe principle of freedom dawned on the world in Rousseau, and gave infinite strength to man, who thus apprehended himself as infinite.\u201d (xv)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

14<\/a>. Quoted by Rosa Luxemburg in Organizational Questions of Russian Social Democracy<\/em> (1904), available in English translation as Leninism or Marxism? <\/em>in The Russian Revolution and Leninism or Marxism?<\/em> (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1961), available online at <http:\/\/www.marxistsfr.org\/archive\/luxemburg\/1904\/questions-rsd\/ch01.htm<\/a>>. Luxemburg\u2019s pamphlet was a critique of Lenin, One Step Forward, Two Steps Back: The Crisis in our Party <\/em>(1904), available online at <http:\/\/www.marxists.org\/archive\/lenin\/works\/1904\/onestep\/q.htm<\/a>><\/p>\n

15<\/a>. Marx, \u201cOn The Jewish Question<\/em>,\u201d in Tucker, ed., Marx-Engels Reader<\/em>, 46.<\/p>\n

16<\/a>. Raymond Lotta, Nayi Duniya, and K.\u00a0J.\u00a0A., Alain Badiou\u2019s \u201cPolitics of Emancipation:\u201d A Communism Locked Within the Confines of the Bourgeois World<\/em>. Available online at <http:\/\/www.demarcations-journal.org\/issue01\/demarcations_badiou.html<\/a>>.<\/p>\n

17<\/a>. Max Horkheimer, \u201cThe Authoritarian State\u201d (1940), in The Essential Frankfurt School Reader<\/em>, Andrew Arato and Eike Gebhardt, eds. (New York: Continuum, 2005), 95.<\/p>\n

18<\/a>. There is an important affinity here with the anarchism of Noam Chomsky and Michael Albert, who consider Marxism to be an ideology of the aspirations to social domination by the \u201ccoordinator class\u201d of intellectuals, which is how they understand the results of, e.g., the Russian and Chinese Revolutions. In this view, Marxism is the means by which the intellectuals harness the class struggle of the workers for other, non-emancipatory ends. Their understanding of the \u201cparty-state\u201d is the regime of the coordinator class.<\/p>\n

19<\/a>. The first Five-Year Plan in the USSR saw the accelerated collectivization of agriculture, in which the Communists unleashed \u201cclass struggle\u201d in the countryside, with great popular participation. This coincided with the Communist International\u2019s policy of refusing any political alliances with reformists, whom they dubbed \u201csocial fascists,\u201d during this period, which they considered the advent of revolution, following the Great Crash. Such extremism caused, not only mass starvation and brutalization of life in the USSR \u2014 whose failures to \u201cbuild socialism\u201d were blamed on \u201cTrotskyite wreckers,\u201d leading to the Purge Trials in the mid- to late 1930s \u2014 but also the eventual victory of the Nazis in Germany. Just as the Purge Trials in the USSR were in response to failures of the Five-Year Plans, the Cultural Revolution in China was a response to the failure of the Great Leap Forward.<\/p>\n

20<\/a>. Immanuel Kant, \u201cIdea for a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Point of View,\u201d trans. Lewis White Beck, in Kant on History<\/em> (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1963), 11\u201325. Also available online at <http:\/\/www.marxists.org\/reference\/subject\/ethics\/kant\/universal-history.htm<\/a>>.<\/p>\n

21<\/a>. See, for instance, the British Trotskyist Cliff Slaughter\u2019s argument, in \u201cWhat is Revolutionary Leadership?\u201d (1960), available online at <http:\/\/www.marxists.org\/history\/etol\/writers\/slaughter\/1960\/10\/leadership.html<\/a>>, in which he pointed out about Stalinism that,<\/p>\n

As a part of [the process of Stalinization], certain theoretical distortions of Marxism play an important part. Above all, Marxism is twisted into an economic determinism. The dialectic is abstracted from history and reimposed on social development as a series of fixed stages. Instead of the rich variety and conflict of human history we have the natural series of slavery, feudalism, capitalism and socialism through which all societies pass\u2026. An apparent touch of flexibility is given to this schematic picture by the doctrine that different countries will find their \u201cown\u201d roads to Socialism, learning from the USSR but adapting to their particular national characteristics. This is of course a mechanical caricature of historical materialism. The connection between the struggles of the working class for Socialism in, say, Britain, Russia and Vietnam, is not at all in the greater or lesser degree of similarity of social structure of those countries, but in the organic interdependence of their struggles. Capitalism is an international phenomenon, and the working class is an international force.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

22<\/a>. Marx, The Civil War in France<\/em>, in Tucker, ed., Marx-Engels Reader<\/em>, 638. Also available online at <http:\/\/www.marxists.org\/archive\/marx\/works\/1871\/civil-war-france\/ch05.htm<\/a>>.<\/p>\n

23<\/a>. Moishe Postone, \u201cMarx after Marxism,\u201d interview by Benjamin Blumberg and Pam C. Nogales C., Platypus Review<\/em> 3 (March 2008). Available online at <http:\/\/platypus1917.org\/2008\/03\/01\/marx-after-marxism-an-interview-with-moishe-postone\/<\/a>>.<\/p>\n

24<\/a>. Bob Avakian, Conquer the World? The International Proletariat Can and Must<\/em>, III. \u201cLeninism as the Bridge,\u201d available online at <http:\/\/www.rwor.org\/bob_avakian\/conquerworld\/index.htm#section_III<\/a>>.<\/p>\n

25<\/a>. Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France<\/em> [1790], J. C. D. Clark, ed. (Standford: Stanford University Press, 2001), 239\u2013240. Also available online at <http:\/\/www.constitution.org\/eb\/rev_fran.htm<\/a>>.<\/p>\n

26<\/a>. See \u201cEuropocentric World Revolution,\u201d in Tucker, ed., Marx-Engels Reader<\/em>, 676. The selection in Tucker, which omits the first sentence, is from a letter from Marx to Engels of October 8, 1858, available online at <http:\/\/www.marxists.org\/archive\/marx\/works\/1858\/letters\/58_10_08.htm<\/a>>.<\/p>\n

27<\/a>. Marx, The Class Struggles in France, 1848\u20131850<\/em>, in Tucker, ed., Marx-Engels Reader<\/em>, 593. Also available online at <http:\/\/www.marxists.org\/archive\/marx\/works\/1850\/class-struggles-france\/ch04.htm<\/a>>.<\/p>\n

28<\/a>. For instance, even many avowed \u201cTrotskyists\u201d were fascinated and inspired by the GPCR. See, for example, Gerry Healy and David North\u2019s International Committee of the Fourth International\u2019s British journal Newsline<\/em> of January 21, 1967, where an article by Michael Banda stated that \u201cthe best elements led by Mao and Lin Piao have been forced to go outside the framework of the Party and call on the youth and the working class to intervene [in this] anti-bureaucratic [fight].\u201d See David North, The Heritage We Defend: A Contribution to the History of the Fourth International <\/em>(Detroit: Labor Publications, 1988), 424. North, who became critical of Banda\u2019s positive perspective on Mao in the Cultural Revolution, is currently the leader of the international tendency of which the Socialist Equality Party is the U.S. section.<\/p>\n

29<\/a>. See \u201cEuropocentric World Revolution,\u201d in Tucker, ed., Marx-Engels Reader<\/em>, 677. The complete letter from Engels to Kautsky of September 12, 1882 is also available online at <http:\/\/www.marxists.org\/archive\/marx\/works\/1882\/letters\/82_09_12.htm<\/a>>.<\/p>\n

30<\/a>. See C. Wright Mills, \u201cLetter to the New Left,\u201d New Left Review <\/em>I\/5 (September\u2013October 1960), 18\u201323.<\/p>\n

31<\/a>. Georg Luk\u00e1cs addressed such transcendence in his eulogy, \u201cLenin \u2014 Theoretician of Practice\u201d (1924), available online at <http:\/\/www.marxists.org\/archive\/lukacs\/works\/xxxx\/lenin.htm<\/a>>. It is also included as part of the \u201cPostcript 1967,\u201d in Luk\u00e1cs, Lenin: A Study on the Unity of His Thought<\/em>, trans. Nicholas Jacobs (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1970), in which Luk\u00e1cs described Lenin as follows:<\/p>\n

In the chain of democratic revolutions in modern times two types of leaders, poles apart, made their appearance, embodied by men such as Danton and Robespierre, in both reality and literature\u2026.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Lenin is the first representative of an entirely new type, a tertium datur<\/em>, as opposed to the two extremes. (93)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

But Marx was also a representative of this new type of revolutionary intellectual.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Chinoiserie A critique of the Revolutionary Communist Party, USA\u2019s \u201cNew Synthesis\u201d Review of Communism: The Beginning of a New Stage, Manifesto from the RCP, USA; and Raymond Lotta, Nayi Duniya, and K.\u00a0J.\u00a0A., \u201cAlain Badiou\u2019s \u2018Politics of Emancipation\u2019: A Communism Locked Within the Confines of the Bourgeois World\u201d Demarcations 1 (Summer\u2013Fall 2009).[1] Chris Cutrone Prologue DAVID […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[10,30,26,16,21,6],"class_list":["post-856","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-essays","tag-10","tag-badiou","tag-maoism","tag-marxism","tag-postmodernism","tag-the-platypus-review"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/chriscutrone.platypus1917.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/856","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/chriscutrone.platypus1917.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/chriscutrone.platypus1917.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chriscutrone.platypus1917.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chriscutrone.platypus1917.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=856"}],"version-history":[{"count":99,"href":"https:\/\/chriscutrone.platypus1917.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/856\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3225,"href":"https:\/\/chriscutrone.platypus1917.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/856\/revisions\/3225"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/chriscutrone.platypus1917.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=856"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chriscutrone.platypus1917.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=856"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chriscutrone.platypus1917.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=856"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}